In
Dreams
Reviewed
by Leonard Heldreth, August, 1999
I've argued that Alfred Hitchcock's
weaker films were often more interesting than stronger films by other
directors, and I tend to take a similar position with the films of
Neil Jordan. He's always trying new techniques, and even when they
don't work, they are often so striking that they linger in the mind
long after more traditional films have disappeared. Such is the case
with In Dreams, which is clearly a weak film but nonetheless a guilty
pleasure.
The film has several problems. The source is what seems
to be a third-rate horror novel, Doll's Eyes by Bari Wood, which was
adapted by Bruce Robinson and Jordan, who failed to net all the red
herrings out of the plot. The initial supposition—that the mind
of a local psycho named Vivian (Robert Downey Jr.) is invading the
mind of a young woman, Claire Cooper (Annette Bening)—can be
accepted for the story, just as the audience accepts the existence
of vampires and werewolves and E. T.—what Coleridge calls "the
willing suspension of disbelief." Unfortunately, the audience
is expected not just to suspend disbelief but to toss it overboard
and accept that the psycho can also mentally control the woman's dog,
make a child's swing move, and turn on radios—all this in what
is supposedly a "realistic" film. Further, the film has
a number of plot complications—the husband's infidelity, the
flooding of a town—that go nowhere or hardly anywhere. Why would
a director make such obvious mistakes? Perhaps, because like Hitchcock,
he didn't want to bother with these matters (look at the awful painted
prop representing San Francisco at the end of Marnie or the skiing
sequence in Spellbound); perhaps because he wanted the audience to
see the entire film operating in the kind of emotional logic that
governs dreams but doesn't add up in waking life. For whatever reason,
accepting these illogical elements requires a greater leap than most
members of the audience are prepared to make, as the universally mediocre
reviews indicated.
Nonetheless, Jordan operates with a writer's emotional
logic and a film maker's eye, and these two attributes lead to some
memorable sequences in the film. The villain (Vivian) is a child abductor
and murderer, and he steals the girl (how is never made clear) during
a school performance of Snow White (but in what school performance
of Snow White has the prince ever come in riding a real white horse
as he does here?). Snow White has succumbed to eating a poisoned apple,
Vivian hides his victims in an old apple warehouse still (strangely)
full of apples that roll down chutes, the mother dreams of apple orchards,
and the radio turns itself on to blare, "Don't sit under the
apple tree." Some metaphoric meaning was intended (stealing apples
is a common theme in Jordan's fiction) but just what?
In the same way, the flooding of a town as part of a WPA
project is visually stunning but the process doesn't follow what logic
says would happen. None of the artifacts have been taken from the
church, including the pews, which are not fastened down; the napkin
holders and furniture in a diner are awash in the water, and it all
looks more like a scene from Titanic than a systematic flooding of
a town (the scenes were, in fact, shot in the same huge tanks in Mexico
where Titanic was filmed). But the visuals are stunning, and the submerged
town can be connected to the submerged personality of Vivian, to the
evil that attacks children, or whatever connection you want to make,
just as the apples can be tied to original sin, and so forth. The
point is that, with all the rich visual and metaphoric texture of
the film, Jordan doesn't indicate how it holds together. The entire
film, both the dream sequences and the realistic sequences, have the
emotional structure, the faulty logic, and the numerous loose ends
that are encountered in dreams. Did Jordan intend it this way or is
it just a bad film? The audiences and time will be the final judges,
just as they have been for Hitchcock's "failures," such
as Vertigo, a film which probably shouldn't be mentioned in the same
breath as In Dreams.
Bening is strong as the mother who loses her daughter;
Downey is twitchy, quirky and maybe a little trite (but interesting)
as the cross-dressing, mother-obsessed Vivian; and Stephen Rea, one
of Jordan's favorite actors from The Crying Game and Michael Collins,
is wasted as Dr. Silverman.
